The mounting of sun visors to headers of vehicles can be costly and labor intensive. Designs have been made which eliminate metal fasteners, such as screws, to reduce the cost and time necessary to mount the sun visors within vehicles.
One such example is U.S. Pat. No. 4,178,035. An annular plug-in body has a plug-in pin at a leading free front end and a flange formed at the rear end. A continuous circumferentially extending groove, located intermediate the front and rear ends, snaps into and cooperates with a receiving hole in a header. The flange has a hollowed out, rounded shape to resiliently self-bias the body around the receiving hole to provide spring support of the plug-in body on the header. An L-shaped axle has a long arm supporting a visor body and a short arm with a terminal mushroom-shaped head. Beneath the head is a shank ending in an encircling shoulder. The head, the shank and the shoulder cooperate to support the body within the header.
However, this design has a number of shortcomings. First, the retention of the plug-in body relative to the header is flexible and does not solidly lock the plug-in body relative to the header. Second, the dimensions and their tolerances on the parts must be relatively tightly held or else the body will be loosely retained to the header. Third, it may be difficult to install the plug-in body within the header aperture as the head is circumferentially continuous and therefore stiff.
The present invention is intended to overcome the aforementioned problems in sun visor retainer assemblies for vehicles.